A contrived future we wouldn’t want to realize

As COVID-19’s winter surge and social restrictions continue, one question on many minds is, “Will this pandemic ever end?”

In Songbird, a Michael Bay thriller released to streaming services in December 2020, it doesn’t. Four years into the future, COVID-19 has mutated into COVID-23, which takes victims from onset to death in 24 hours. The airborne virus is so contagious that streets are deserted, citizens live in locked-down homes, everyone takes remote daily virus checks via phone app, and armed “sanitation” workers in hazmat suits break down doors to transport the infected and close contacts to a designated “Q-Zone” to await death. The only “free” citizens are those few who are certifiably immune, and they do a public service delivering supplies to private homes on bicycles.

The drama involves lovers, immune courier Nico (K.J. Apa) and Sara (Sofia Carson), who communicate only through walls or social media. When Sara’s grandmother contracts COVID, Nico races to find a black-market immunity bracelet for Sara before sanitation workers take her to the Q-Zone. Meanwhile, a sleazy upper-class black marketer turns violent against the lonely YouTube performer he’s been involved with, who has befriended a disabled vet whose self-imposed isolation predated the pandemic.
Songbird depicts a worst-case scenario none of us care to consider. It’s about how desperate people must do things they don’t like to survive, or to protect the ones they love, as characters explain separately in the film. Such moral reasoning is fraught with error, but it’s not an untypical rationalization even outside crisis situations.

Some say it’s “too soon” and exploitative to make a pandemic film. They forget that some classic war movies were made in wartime — Casablanca and To Be Or Not To Be were both released in 1942 — although Songbird is not in that company. Others say the plot is thin, doesn’t deal in political or social issues, or encourages deep-state conspiracy theorists. That’s arguably true – but it’s a mild thriller nonetheless.

GERALD KORSON is a Legatus magazine staff writer.